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How “The Pitt” Diagnoses America's Ills
“The Pitt,” which recently began streaming on Max, spans a single shift in the life of a doctor at an underfunded Pittsburgh hospital where, in the course of fifteen gruelling hours, he and his team …
Published on 9 months, 2 weeks ago
In “Severance,” the Gothic Double Lives On
“Severance” is an office drama with a twist: the central characters have undergone a procedure to separate their work selves (“innies,” in the parlance of the show) from their home selves (“outies”).…
Published on 9 months, 4 weeks ago
The Staying Power of the “S.N.L.” Machine
The first episode of “Saturday Night Live,” which aired in October of 1975, was a loose, scrappy affair. The sketches were experimental, almost absurdist, and the program was peppered with standup fr…
Published on 10 months ago
How Romantasy Seduces Its Readers
A few years back, novels classed as “romantasy”—a portmanteau of “romance” and “fantasy”—might have seemed destined to attract only niche appeal. But since the pandemic, the genre has proved nothing …
Published on 10 months, 1 week ago
David Lynch’s Unsolvable Puzzles
David Lynch, who died last month at seventy-eight, was a director of images—one whose distinctive sensibility and instinct for combining the grotesque and the mundane have influenced a generation of …
Published on 10 months, 2 weeks ago
The Splendor of Nature, Now Streaming
In 1954, a young David Attenborough made his début as the star of a new nature show called “Zoo Quest.” The docuseries, which ran for nearly a decade on the BBC, was a sensation that set Attenborough…
Published on 10 months, 3 weeks ago
The New Western Gold Rush
Westward expansion has been mythologized onscreen for more than a century—and its depiction has always been entwined with the politics and anxieties of the era. In the 1939 film “Stagecoach,” John Wa…
Published on 11 months, 1 week ago
The Elusive Promise of the First Person
The first person is a narrative style as old as storytelling itself—one that, at its best, allows us to experience the world through another person’s eyes. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson…
Published on 11 months, 2 weeks ago
Hayao Miyazaki’s Magical Realms
Margaret Talbot, writing in The New Yorker in 2005, recounted that when animators at Pixar got stuck on a project they’d file into a screening room to watch a film by Hayao Miyazaki. Best known for w…
Published on 11 months, 4 weeks ago
Critics at Large Live: The Year of the Flop
This year, high-profile failures abounded. Take, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project “Megalopolis,” which cost a hundred and forty million dollars to make—and brought in less than ten…
Published on 1 year ago